Some songs start out peppy and intriguing, but his moaning over top sucks all the life out of the groove.

Hopefully, Canadian audiences won’t be fooled by the British hype, because Bell X1 don’t have what it takes to win over the Great White North.

The sick is far outweighed by the sloppy as the selection shifts from slo-mo chronic puffers to wobbly boozer bumps bracketed by two thugged-out rips by Guilty Simpson.

Their beats and rhymes reflect none of the punchliney fun they used to have.

At best, the songs on their ninth album are bland recreations of their past successes.

So there’s no shortage of sick beats, but Common’s decision to dumb down his rhymes to a rude and rudimentary level comes off horribly crass at best and at worst downright embarrassing.

The songs are not so much about love as the memory of love and, accordingly, there's a chasm between her aggressive vocal runs and the cautiously generalist lyrics, especially on the maudlin latter half.

Hungry Bird is tired, unvaried and dull, possibly because the band’s dissolved and reformed many times since 1991, with singer/songwriter/guitarist Eef Barzelay the only constant.

He doesn't sound convincingly comfortable in this power-ballad terrain that once worked so well for him in Temple Of The Dog.

Melt doesn't sound fractured because of a glut of geographical references but because of its pieced-together nature.

Going for immediate and real, Young ends up with a disc that resembles a tentative early demo for what could have been a decent (albeit strange) Crazy Horse album.

He’s crafted yet another replica batch of breezy, walk-along-the-beach jams [which] won’t matter to his fans, who keep coming back to their sandal-footed prophet regardless.

The most frustrating part is that many of the songs are decent, but they're consistently compromised by the ham-fisted presentation.

The pitch-correction software is alive and well even on this record.... This glaring inconsistency is the least of BP3’s missteps.

As with similar high-concept projects, most of it doesn't work, and the most successful pairings are often the ones you'd least expect.

Concocting a ruse about how the album came about after discovering a cardboard box of dusty and undated reel-to-reel tapes of the BPA’s lost studio sessions from the 70s seems foolish and unnecessary if the recordings were good enough to stand on their own merit. Sadly, other than Iggy Pop’s crack at the Monochrome Set tune He’s Frank, they’re not.

If this weren’t such a disingenuous, cynical and generally creepy record, it would be something I could really get behind.

It’s not a complete washout; there are indeed some promising moments. Unfortunately, none of them get developed enough to compensate for the bland­ness of the rest of the album.

Three albums and 700 guitar solos later, they sound like a band becoming a bit too comfortable in their niche.

The bigger problem, though, is Young Buck's yawn-inducing rhyme flow, which, paired with relentlessly slow, chugging beats, creates pure aural Sominex.

Replacement guitarist Luke Paquin is serviceable but stays in the shadows, while vocalist Steve Bays sheds more of HHH's former skin on a sonically big record that offers only rare doses of the pulsating new wave punk energy they once emitted.

TPC keep their songs taut and mostly under three minutes, so Elephant Shell whips by in a charging whirl of indie rock urgency but skips on substance.

The whole album lacks focus. Williams jumps around from big band to Pet Shop Boys electro to piano ballads to easy rocking. The one common thread is overproduction.

While her straightforward songwriting certainly comes across as honest, it can feel a little hokey.

Vetiver’s 2006 To Find Me Gone found that nice place for campfire listening, but tracks like Everyday and More Of This sound more like background tunes released for the purpose of selling a digital camera or a cellphone with really good reception.

Despite Keys's proficiency (she co-wrote Where's The Fun In Forever, one of the best songs on Miguel's new album), she's always seemed a little boring. On that front, she delivers.

Maybe the label was hoping to get back some of the Goo Goos' 90s magic, but that doesn't happen.

NAV’s songcraft is sharp, but the lack of dynamics ultimately makes this debut feel one-note.

Choosing to record only songs by women is an intriguing twist. It might actually have made for a great comeback album if Moorer had dug a little deeper for more appropriate material.

The biggest problem is Morrissey himself, who sounds like he’s trying to be clever rather than actually demonstrating that infamously razor-sharp wit.

The album doesn’t sound phoned in, necessarily, but it absolutely sounds vacuous, vapid and clichéd.

Despite exceptionally strong hooks and her fine, assured singing, it's hard not to feel frustrated by Consentino's lack of depth and constant use of the most obvious rhymes.

There are a couple of moments of idiosyncrasy here, particularly on the title track and 'On & On,' but Guilt’s formulaic approach makes it easy to pass on the whole album.

Cabaret with Drake has a catchy hook and gorgeously cheesy lyrics only Timberlake can pull off. The countrified Drink You Away almost works. The rest is forgettable.

The appeal is easy to hear, but ultimately X undermines emotional rawness with slick production and lyrical goop that feels calculated and bland.

After an album's worth of tiring, spastic jazzy post-punk that smacks of musical masturbation, chances are you'll really miss At the Drive-In.

N Jo’s fan base doesn’t care about calculation. They’re just the right age to buy into the workmanlike quasi-genuine rock of Who I Am. And there’s still enough of that original Jonas flavour to keep them interested.

More of that raw Jay and less of the glitz could have salvaged the album.

An album that’s bogged down by a rapper--and production--stuck in the middle of the last decade.

The lack of memorable choruses and melodies is made all the more frustrating by the surprisingly decent production.

His newest album, on the other hand, is all technique and no emotion.

There's the occasional clever turn of phrase, but MellowHype's brand of vulgarity is subtler and less arresting than Tyler's.

The eclectic approach was often messy but also fresh, which can't be said for their middling sixth LP.

Here And Now reinforces all the reasons so many people hate Nickelback, but those are exactly the same things that make fans pump their fists in the air.

Those two qualities [Perry's sex appeal and goofy, self-effacing charm] are out of balance for most of the album, resulting in awkward jams like E.T. (Futuristic Lover) and Peacock.

G. Love sounds at home pouring his heart out about his grandmother and making bong-smoker anthems, but a few numbers sound clichéd.

Taylor isn't pushing the limits of pop so much as flattening and stretching them out until they evaporate into nothingness. He creates a dreamy mood, but you may not be awake by the end.

A resounding disappointment.

Galactic’s Ya-Ka-May works as a concept album, but its execution ranges from grating to tolerable.

Sadly, Jane's Addiction lost the fire ages ago and are now sleepwalking through the ashes.

Despite flashes of melodic and lyrical inventiveness, production-wise Kelly sounds like he’s chasing innovators The-Dream and Mike WiLL Made It, especially on the strip club tracks.

Much of her music aims to capture elusive emotions, yet she ends up spelling them out with literal refrains, banal narratives and sexed-up histrionics that leave little to the imagination.

if her music, which sounds like it was created using a supercomputer analyzing months of market-research-driven algorithms determined by the texting and internet search habits of suburban females aged 12 to 18, sets out to be catchy, slick, radio junk food--mission accompli$hed.

With the exception of the exuberant 'Pop Champagne,' which was a Ron Brownz single before Jones hopped on it, Reign is a washout.

The album's overall bad rip-off of early Britney/current Chantal Chamandy sound is a huge step backward.

It's all about throwback synth melodies, programmed beats and melodramatic bellowing about non-specific relationship trauma, sorta like Human League, Spandau Ballet or maybe the Associates.

That free-form fury is a critique of the tendency to look for precise meaning in music, thereby devaluing the visceral and the emotional. But the most menacing part is the words uttered at the beginning.

Haze is positioning herself as a top 40 infiltrator, which is fine, but she’s also diluted her uniqueness.

There’s more softness and vulnerability than one usually associates with the Weeknd, but also his signature numbness. ... Opener Call Out My Name’s title is typical of the EP’s uninteresting lyrical approach, but he sings with a grandness that is further amplified by sturdy production choices: a buzzing bass line and waltzing drum beat that sounds recycled from hit single Earned It.

Not for the first time, Ciara is suffering from a case of mixed-bag syndrome, a situation that seems even direr on the 16-track deluxe version, which has two unnecessary alternate versions of I Bet.

His subpar wordplay is easily out-rapped and out-sung by guests like Future and 2 Chainz.

Flint and Maxim toss off innocuous, vague lyrics in the hope that something sticks. Nothing really does, and the joyless end result is flat-out exhausting.

If the English art-school psychedelic trio had been able to keep up that momentum, their third album would be a solid one. Instead, they stumble and disappoint.

Meh. Patti Smith does it better.

Unfortunately Summers’s voice and persona just don’t suit this material.

It suffers from its uniformly dark tone and funereal tempos, and Ahearn’s attempts to sweeten things with an overly polished mix only makes a sad situation worse.

The band tries out big, fuzzy, folksy blues riffs on tracks like 'The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid and The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing,' but the proggy result is unmemorable and middling.

Nas isn't as passionate or well-informed about Africa's issues as he is about his own, a problem on an album that's supposed to be all about... Africa....Meanwhile, Marley dutifully toasts over the record's limp, rootsy production but really only wakes up for the harder beats, which are few and far between.

Its best moments reference the label’s penchant for breezy, languorous guitar lines, like on the catchy Weekenders. If only Minks would lay off the synth and embrace the guitar more often.

The album's dominant sound is dreary even by Wu standards: grey, bass-heavy beats for the eight living members' equally drab rhymes.

Morning Report finds Arkells lost and deep outside of their comfort zone.

As endearing as Jorge Garcia's face is, shining warmly from the cover of Weezer's eighth release, the timely pop reference to a Lost character is the perfect symbol for a band on a continued downward spiral into meme-based gimmickry and music with zero staying power.

She hits rock bottom on the repetitive, bland Daydreaming. It really does feel like a daydream, this whole idea of crowning a new female rap queen.

The amount of fatigue and cynicism baked into 14th album Innocence Reaches is not just a bummer; it's verging on ominous.

Whether anyone outside of the NPR listening audience actually gives a shit about what clever socio-political points Cooder is trying to make metaphorically is difficult to say.

Yoav’s whole shtick is that he only plays the acoustic guitar, but he runs it through a looping pedal to make drum and keyboard sounds. Conceptually, it’s an okay idea, and Yoav pulls it off, but it gets boring fast.

If this were purely an experimental electronic album, we'd overlook the lack of hooks, but even as such it's not particularly impressive.

Sadly, this is a posthumous offering that sounds half-finished and, considering they must have known this would be their final statement, like a missed opportunity.

CSS are so desperate to do something new that they never stick with their strengths.

Sonically, the first half of Unapologetic picks up on the syrupy Southern hip-hop minimalism popular last summer, while much of the latter half is a grab bag of unwieldy balladry.

First single Dope has that by way of Dr. Dre’s Deep Cover, but it fails to push the balance of the album beyond mediocrity.

Problem is, the odd hodge-podge of tracks have no apparent connection to each other and certainly don't make for a coherent statement or even a decent mixtape.

Petty’s classic pop knack, breezy melodies and laid-back drawl take a back seat to Campbell’s meandering, jammy solos and the album’s overwhelmingly old-guy-blues sound.

Lux sounds a lot like the kinds of slowly evolving patterns you can generate with those apps, but they come across as disappointingly ordinary when divorced from that participatory element.

He seems stuck between self-consciously chasing mainstream pop crossover and some underground ideal, and pulls off neither.

Blood struggles to shift out of platitude territory with lyrics fixated on horizons, stars and sunsets, and it soon becomes apparent that La Havas is content not to go much deeper than vague universalism requires.

[The album showcases] her technical precision as a singer but reluctance to colour outside the lines.

What makes Under The Blacklight a true disappointment is the shoddy songcraft.

The surprising question about the new recording by the RZA as alter ego Bobby Digital is not whether the outlandish masked get-ups, goofy comic strip scenarios and uninspired rhymes will undermine his credibility as the Wu Tang overlord, but whether he’s lost his production touch.

Their five-song EP produced by Dave Grohl and featuring covers of songs by ABBA, Depeche Mode, Roky Erickson and Army of Lovers is ridiculously lightweight.

It's a cool premise, but despite the ambition and guest musicians on each song, Sonic Highways sounds like every other Foo Fighters record.

4:13 Dream is slightly better than the misguided hype suggests.

The aggressive push into overblown choruses drowns the warmth and personality of his production work.

The occasional bright spot (Ghostface's blistering verse on Meteor Hammer) is always counterbalanced by a low point (Trife Diesel's middling turn on Laced Cheeba).

No matter how glossy the production, it’s impossible not to notice that Simpson can’t sing well enough to carry an album, while her peppy, Avril-lite personality comes off as contrived and as obnoxious as Lavigne’s.

The central dichotomous tension is blandly predictable (loud-quiet-loud-quiet), the songwriting occasionally sharp, but its political themes--like its vocalist--are lost in the fury.

The results turn out to be lifeless instead of uplifting and accessible as they'd hoped.